Soon after that fishing trip, at the age of seventy-one, Gey learned he had the disease
he’d spent his entire life trying to fight. And he had one of its most deadly forms: pancreatic
cancer. If doctors didn’t operate, Gey knew he would die within months. If they did, it might
buy him a little time. Or it might not.
On August 8, 1970, around 6:00 a.m., Margaret called each member of the Gey lab’s staff,
including a postdoctoral student who’d just flown in on a red-eye from Europe.
“Come down to the lab as fast as you can,” she told them. “There’s going to be an emer-
gency procedure this morning.” She didn’t tell them what that procedure would be.
Before going into the operating room, George told his surgeons that he wanted them to take
samples of his tumor, just as Dr. Wharton had done with Henrietta’s tumor decades earlier.
Gey gave his lab staff careful instructions for growing GeGe, a line of cancer cells taken from
his pancreas. He hoped that his cells, like Henrietta’s, would become immortal.
“Work all day and night if you have to,” he told his postdocs and assistants. “Make this
happen.”
Soon, with Gey anesthetized on the operating table, surgeons opened him up and found
that the cancer was inoperable—growths covered his stomach, spleen, liver, and intestines.
They worried that cutting into the cancer might kill him. Despite Gey’s wishes, they sewed him
up without taking any samples. When he awoke from anesthesia and found out there would
be no GeGe line, he was furious. If this cancer was going to kill him, he wanted it to help ad-
vance science in the process.
As soon as he’d recovered enough from his surgery to travel, Gey began contacting can-
cer researchers around the country, asking who was doing research on pancreatic cancer
and needed a patient to experiment on. He was flooded with replies—some from scientists he
didn’t know, others from friends and colleagues.
In the three months between his surgery and his death, Gey went to the Mayo Clinic in
Minneapolis for a week of treatments with an experimental Japanese drug that made him viol-
ently ill. His son, George Jr., who had just finished medical school, sat with Gey through the
whole thing and made sure he had a freshly pressed suit each day. After leaving the Mayo
Clinic, Gey spent several days in New York City at Sloan-Kettering for another study, and he
underwent chemotherapy at Hopkins using a drug not yet approved for use in humans.
Gey was six and a half feet tall and about 215 pounds when he was diagnosed, but he
withered quickly. He often doubled over from abdominal pain, he vomited constantly, and the
treatments soon left him confined to a wheelchair. But he continued showing up at the lab and
writing letters to his colleagues. At some point not long before his death, he told his former as-
sistant Mary Kubicek that it was fine to release Henrietta’s name if anyone asked, since it had